Those Who Uphold

As I’ve been working on my latest book proposal, I’ve thought about the page for Acknowledgments. Usually, I don’t read those pages in other books. I don’t know the people listed there, and it’s really a thank you page for the author.

But as I’ve thought about my own acknowledgments, I’m listing all the people who have prayed for us this past year. Some of them I see every week at church or in cell groups. Some of them respond to me via e-mail: “I’m praying for you, asking God to give you a job.” Still others, I won’t see or even know about until I meet them in heaven.

God knows each of these prayer warriors and calls them by name. He even knows the number of hairs on their heads and the brown spots on their hands.

In the darkest moments of this year-long wait, I’ve often asked God to tell somebody to pray for me. I’m certain he has done that, because we’ve made it through almost a year of living by faith and trusting God to take care of us. When discouragement hits, inevitably, someone is enlisted to pray, because the depression lifts and we make it to another day.

The Amplified Bible expresses an important sentiment about those who pray, “Behold, God is my helper and ally; the Lord is my upholder and is with them who uphold my life” (Ps. 54:4).

God is with those who uphold me. Emanuel lives in them and with them. He triggers the times they need to lift up my son and me. God helps me, and he helps them.
In my list of acknowledgments, I hold those praying people as a special corps of dedicated folks and pray that God will bless them even as they have blessed me.